Applied Physics

Giant freak waves - seriously, that is what oceanographers and physicists call them - are called that because they can appear on the open sea out of nowhere. Researchers from the Ruhr- Universität Bochum and the University of Umeå, Sweden say they have developed a new statistical model for non-linear, interacting waves in computer simulations which will allow them to be theoretically calculated and modeled. They say their model explains how the water-wave system evolves, behaves and, above all, how it stabilizes itself.   They say their model is also suitable for the calculation of…

Cooks want to tell you grilling is an art or a craft.   We know better.  Grilling, like anything worth doing, is a science.   Anything that has been around for a million years is a science and fire has been considered by millenia as the thing that put humans on the map so nothing is more fundamental to anthropology, evolution and archeology than man, meat and fire. But science is not always simple and that is why some think they can't grill so they have to call it an art instead.    Grilling is easy when you have a science mentality.   You just need to quantify…

If you hadn't noticed before today, the impact of the Gulf Oil spill may have been understated.  Sure, sure, I know what you are thinking; in the Internet-plus-24-hour-news-Age everything is overstated but just this once the mass hysteria apparently did not come close to the actual damage. The issue still remains how to clean it up and it will involve a little bit of cutting edge technology but also a whole lot of ancient physics - and I'll even show you how to duplicate it in your house. The solutions to the Gulf Oil spill have ranged from kooky (set the thing on fire) to well-meaning,…

I went to the Scottish Games in Woodland, California last weekend, two young boys in tow.  They weren't remotely interested in Scottish women doing traditional dances and they were vaguely intrigued by why men wore kilts. "Papa, why is that man wearing a skirt?" Colin asked. Being that we were east of highway 5 this was a perfectly reasonable question.   "It's a kilt," I explained.  "If he wore anything underneath it would be a skirt." Like this fellow: But they were incredibly interested in the very large men throwing telephone poles.  So I set out to explain how it…

Inkjet Printing Technique Inkjet printing is a liquid deposition technique, by which the droplets of the ink were ejected with the same volume and printed on the substrate. It is a low cost, material-conserving, non-contact, additive patterning, and maskless approach with the scalability to large area manufacturing. According to the formation of the uniform drops, printers are classified into two categories: continuous inkjet printer and drop-on-demand (DOD) inkjet printer. For continuous inkjet printer, the ink ejected by the high pressure is broken into uniform droplets by electromechanical…

Why Anchors Don't Work From earliest times to today, from boat safety pamphlet to engineering treatise on marine architecture: all are agreed that the anchor does the work of keeping a boat or ship from moving. It doesn't.  It can't. Machines can do work, but an anchor is not a machine. A vessel on any body of water is subjected to wind and water forces tending to move it.  In order for it to remain in a well defined geographical area the vessel must in some way oppose those forces.  The notion that any anchor, however designed, can somehow cancel those forces is false…

Spaceship Earth: Entropy Factor #1 We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.Adlai Ewing Stevenson Global Energy ConsumptionIf you take widely available figures for national populations and aggregate them you get close on 6.7 billion humans on this one tiny planet.  If you take widely available figures for oil, coal and gas consumption, convert to Joules and…

Engineers from the University of Florida and Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea have developed what they call a 'nearly perfect hydrophobic interface' by reproducing, on small bits of flat plastic, the shape and patterns of the minute hairs that grow on the bodies of spiders. A paper describing the new water repellent surface, appears this month in Langmuir. "They have short hairs and longer hairs, and they vary a lot. And that is what we mimic," said Wolfgang Sigmund, a professor of materials science and engineering. Spiders use their water-repelling hairs to stay dry or avoid drowning,…

Getting More Bang Per Buck In The Steam Age Once the physics of steam engines began to be understood, engineers were able to focus their minds on how to get more power for the same fuel, or the same power from less fuel. A simple way to get more useful power from a steam engine is to lag the boiler.  Coal which was used to produce waste heat could be used to produce more steam.  This gives more miles per ton of coal.  Of course, the railway engineers knew that they could carry on using the same amount of coal over the same mileage and go for higher speed.  Which they did.…

Pushing The Moon Away With Victorian Machinery This is a further article in my occasional series about coal, engines and energy, heat and thermodynamics.  In this article I am going to show you how to push the Moon further away using some very basic machinery invented by 19th century scientists and engineers.  Yes!   Really! This Earth of ours is so huge in scale compared to our puny bodies.  How could it be possible that by our ordinary actions we could alter the whole Earth climate system? Let me try to give you a perspective on that, at the scale of a classroom…